It was a uncommonly windy day on the delta. Our poler (the guy with the giant pole who pushed the canoe through the reeds) struggled to steady the slender canoe just barely an inch above the water. With every gust of wind we were inundated with water and made to suffer wet-butt. But being water logged was the LEAST of my worries.
I wish I could describe the deep reverberating gutteral grunt of a hippo to make you understand my terror, but there's just no way unless you feel like getting in a fragile peice of wood and floating into their personal space, good luck! In one moment I had the overwhelming realization that we were, in fact, in the wild. We were miles from the nearest hospital. We were in potao territory, and they kill more people in Africa than any other animal every year. Good. Great. It's right there. I mean right there.
All I could do was repeat Caz's name. Just to make sure she knew we were right next to a pod of a seemingly innocent potato-like creatures. "Yea yea" she just kept saying. I didn't know it at the time but while I was having a heart attack about being eaten by a giant potato, she was sitting behind me covered in a fallen nest of spiders and was silently trying to kill them without me knowing, as she well knows we all would have gone overboard if I found a spider on me. All this and both of is trying not to move in the very very very unsteady mokoro. It was a contained panic.
We eventually made it, and had a lovely night camping under the stars on an isolated island covered in elephant poop. We went on a walk through the bush and had great conversations with the guys running the camp, and didn't see anymore hippos!
...until we had to get out of the delta... No more wind and not as many spiders, but the delta-spuds had grown in numbers and curiosity. I managed to not think about them until I couldn't ignore them anymore. We reached a clearing in the reeds, and there they were. Many of them. Slowly sinking below the water and resurfacing 10 feet closer. Beady little angry eyes staring at us. This is it. We're gonna die. While I'm having a legitimate panic attack our poler thought it was a good idea to reiterate all the dangerous facts about the animals closing in on us. Ha. Ha. So I'm sure I've repressed the rest of the journey out of pure fear and adrenaline overload but we made back to land and safety and onward to elephant Sands Lodge. Ahh, I thought, elephants... happy gentle giants...
We watched the landscape change as time went by from dry to more dry, shrubbery to trees, semi-developed to barely anything. Elephant Sands looked like a shithole at first glance. Dust and unwelcoming felled acacia trees being their primary medium for ambiance. After a long journey we were less than pleased to find no a/c, no freshwater showers, smashed window screens, only one mosquito net for the room, and we had to lug our backpacks through hot sand to our shitty little stand alone chalet through a brambling patch of acacia thorns. Great. And to top it all off Caz got a thorn right through her shoe.
"If I don't see an elephant in the next two hours I'm gonna so mad..." I said. I ate my words as I turned around and saw 3 massive male elephants walked into the semicircle of chalets surrounding the main building of the lodge. Oh my god... We stood agape in total disbelief. Not only were they less than 100 yards in front of us, but there was zero protection for us to walk back to the lodge. None. Good luck! So now it all made sense, watching the next group of 4 more elephants meander into the compound, I realized why this place looked so terrible. Because elephants destroyed it daily. So I switched my opinion in .02 seconds from "this place is awful" to "great job keeping the buildings standing guys!!". It was a job enough to keep walls intact, forget landscaping!
Walking to the lodge for dinner after a salt water shower in our oven hot room, we noticed too late that we were surrounded by enormous bull elephants. At least 5. It's shocking how quiet they are. We were told not to run or turn our backs so we just paused. Hmm. Never thought I'd be faced with this perdicament in my life EVER. Intuitively we ducked into a bush just as a young male ran by towards another with his ears splayed out maybe 15 feet in front of us. We managed to get out of the tangle of thorns and walk briskly to the veranda of the lodge.
There were well over 30 elephants surrounding the watering hole as the sun set, just feet from the minuscule "wall" that divided the wild from the hotel. There was nothing in between us.
Let's play count the elephants! So now imagine having to walk back to our little box of a room in the dark completely surrounded by dozens of elephants who are creepy silent. Thank god we didn't have to hid in anymore thorny bushes. The rest of the night was spent fighting my mosquito net.
The next morning we saw the real struggle of operating a lodge as unique as elephant sands; a few elephants got together and completely ripped down a stone wall to get to a water tank. This hotel is really struggling to keep things operating! But kudos to them for still existing in such an unforgiving environment.
So all in all I've learned that herbivores may only eat plants but god dammit some of them are huge and irrationally angry. None so much as the hippotato. Elephants are awesome, just don't keep water from them.
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